The President’s primary preoccupation engenders a certain amount of armchair psychology among those who know and work with the “builder-in-chief.” One Cabinet secretary told me, “It’s a diversion for him. If he’s doing stuff with gravity, like Iran, he loves to be able to turn to this.” (“Oil?” the secretary added. “Enough already!”) Or, as a person who knew Trump in New York put it, “There’s a little bit of Nero fiddling while Rome burns.” One former Administration official told me that the President is “trying to project an image of American greatness,” then suggested that I consult a relevant book, “Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics.” Its author, Frederic Spotts, argues that Hitler, a painter in his youth, saw himself as an artist reshaping the cultural essence of Germany. The former official said, “It opens with this very memorable scene of Hitler in the bunker toward the end of everything, and he’s obsessing over these architectural models of Linz, Austria, which is where he was from, and how he was going to make it this European cultural city.” The senior Administration official told me that the projects represented Trump’s attempt to overcome D.C.’s “sclerotic mind-set—all these Lilliputians tying Gulliver down.” He went on, “Break free, and build.”
To realize these visions, Trump has bent the systems of American government to his will: expanding executive authority, barrelling past Congress, stacking planning commissions and civic institutions with loyalists, and taking a legal fight that began with the demolition of the East Wing—which he ordered to clear space for the ballroom—all the way to the Supreme Court. “Some of us are getting four to five hours of sleep a night, trying to keep up with the President,” a person who works closely with Trump on the projects told me. Another adviser said, “Everything is riding on this. It’s nice to have a President who cares, but where does it stop?” He reminded me that they were now reviewing plans to paint the historic granite of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building bright white. Trump often tells aides a story about the original architect. So many people thought his building was ugly, the President says, that he killed himself.
A common question in Washington this summer: How much time is the Administration spending on these projects? One afternoon, I stopped by the White House to ask. “We all have our issue buckets,” a West Wing staffer told me—national security, immigration, foreign policy, and so on—“and the project portfolio, the construction, is a key policy focus itself now.” The President has, for instance, directed Vince Haley, the head of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, to make getting the arch built his “primary thing.”
Trump had just flown back from a NATO summit in Ankara; he’d been smuggled out of Turkey via a catering truck and a decoy plane after Iranian threats on his life. He marked his return by posting a photograph of new gold lettering reading “The West Wing” that had been installed during his trip: “Newly revamped . . . including signage and renovated walls, maple trees, and plantings!” This was a relatively small flourish on a property undergoing so much renovation that it looks more or less like a demolition site. Next to the Executive Mansion was a gaping hole where the East Wing used to be. The South Lawn was being replaced by a new helipad for Marine One. To the north, Lafayette Park was barely visible behind security fencing. Trump had refurbished two ornamental fountains, for seventeen million dollars, and wants the park to have forty-seven maple trees, in homage to himself.
Cartoon by Roland High
During visits to the White House, I’d grown accustomed to passing by work crews, cranes swinging above the rubble, and dump trucks queuing at the security perimeter. That afternoon, I watched as workers on the North Portico draped scaffolding with a tarp depicting the Portico’s famous columns. Later, on Truth Social, Trump posted photos of the plaster at the bottom of the (real) columns. “It hasn’t been fixed in decades,” he wrote. In a recent podcast interview, Doug Burgum, the Secretary of the Interior, explained, “President Trump comes out to greet a world leader, he sees door dings in the pillars, and says, ‘Look at all this stuff that needs to be repaired.’ ”